Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Thomas Hardy's Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement

Thomas Hardy's Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement

Benziman, Galia

Hardcover

Poetry Criticism

ISBN10: 1137507128
ISBN13: 9781137507129
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: Apr 10 2018
Pages: 173
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English

This book examines the transition from traditional to modern elegy through a close study of Thomas Hardy's oeuvre and its commitment to mourning and remembrance. Hardy is usually read as an avowed elegist who writes against the collective forgetfulness typical of the late-Victorian era. But Hardy, as argued here, is dialectically implicated in the very cultural and psychological amnesia that he resists, as her book demonstrates by expanding the corpus of study beyond the spousal elegies (the Poems of 1912-1913) to include a wide variety of poems, novels and short stories that deal with bereavement and mourning. Locating the modern aspect of Hardy's elegiac writing in this ambivalence and in the subversion of memory as unreliable, the book explores the textual moments at which Hardy challenges binary dichotomies such as forgetting vs. remembering, narcissism vs. unselfish commitment, grief vs. betrayal, the work of mourning vs. melancholia, presence vs. absence. The book's analysisallows us to relate Hardy's elegiac poetics, and particularly his description of the mourner as a writer, to shifting late-Victorian conceptualizations of death, memory, art, science and gender relations.

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